Implementation advice

Explanation

Best practice for content pages is to support use of the HTTP GET method on a unique URL to reliably return the unique content for that URL.

Basic HTML links use the GET method by default but there are ways to override this behavior to the detriment of the website and the user experience.

For example:

Re-use of a URL to present different content resources based on session identifiers, POST data, cookies or other techniques for saving state cause difficulties for search engines and users and can introduce serious security and privacy issues.

Best practice for handling form submissions dictates that:

the user should be able to return to the page containing the form they submitted using only a single click of their browser software's back button:

when a user is returned to the form page, the form should still contain the data the user submitted (modern user agents provide this behaviour by default).

if the action is safe, the resultant page should be directly addressable (so the result page URL can be emailed or bookmarked).